Tehran, IRNA – President Masoud Pezeshkian has thanked Mohammad-Javad Zarif, his former vice-president for strategic affairs.
In a message on Wednesday, the president acknowledged that “a set of constraints” had led to Zarif’s exit from the administration but said he was still willing to use the former vice-president’s “scientific merits and experience.”
Zarif resigned from President Pezeshkian’s administration on March 3. At the time, he wrote on X that he had been invited by Judiciary Chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei for a meeting during which the chief justice had advised that the vice-president resign given “the situation in the country.”
He said he hoped that by leaving the administration, those hindering the realization of “the people’s will and the success of the administration” would be stripped of excuses.
Since he was tapped as vice-president, Zarif had been taking intense heat by a group of lawmakers in Parliament who argued that his appointment to a sensitive post was illegal because at least one of his children holds U.S. nationality. According to Iranian law, individuals who hold foreign citizenship or whose immediate family members hold such citizenship cannot be assigned to sensitive posts in the Iranian government. But Zarif’s children were born in the United States when he was a student there, acquiring natural citizenship upon birth.
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